Abstract
Identity work has become a marketable asset in the platform economy—one that must align with both audience expectations and platform logics to achieve visibility. Yet recognition-enabling systems also expose creators to harassment and suppression. To examine these dynamics, this study examines #JewTok, a TikTok enclave dedicated to mobilizing Jewish identity as a form of entrepreneurial labor shaped by tension and precarity. Drawing on ethnographic observation of 27 accounts and interviews with 12 creators, we identify two central entrepreneurial practices: (1) Jewish ambassadorship, where creators engage in cultural brokerage, community building, religious exploration, and justice advocacy to cultivate solidarity, translate traditions, and mobilize visibility; and (2) Jewish hardships, where creators confront algorithmic antisemitism while their content is subjected to surveillance dynamics that render Jewish life hypervisible, and stripped of context. The findings show that creative labor is especially precarious when tied to ethnoreligious identity—amplifying racialized hierarchies and rendering some voices increasingly (in)visible. We argue that creators navigate these volatile conditions in their identity work due to platform design and governance structures, which in turn transform identity into a precarious commodity sustained through entrepreneurial labor.
Introduction
The boundaries between labor and identity are increasingly blurred within the creator economy. Wielding and refining an outward-facing identity becomes the intentional labor of sustaining a personal “brand” (). Such aspirations open the question of where work stops and identity begins. This fluidity offers both benefits and risks for content creators online; it offers opportunity for greater autonomy and creative liberty, yet also normalizes self-exploitation and precarity (; ; Rauchberg, 2025; Maddox, 2021). These risks are compounded by the fact that creators’ visibility, expression, and circulation are beholden to biased algorithmic logic and governance mechanisms beyond their control.
Yet this visibility comes at a price, especially on platforms like TikTok. The same algorithmic mechanisms driving engagement can also exacerbate harms for vulnerable creators who center identity in their platform work (Salhi and Goldhorn, 2023). Here, visibility operates as a double-edged sword. It is aspirational, promising growth and recognition, yet also compulsory, as platform logics make visibility the only way to reach both in-group and broader audiences, even when that exposure entails risk and harm (, ). As a platform, TikTok’s enclaves offer racial minorities and ethnoreligious groups spaces to carve out visibility and representation (; Taylor and Abidin, 2024), enabling individuals to articulate identity in accordance with platforms’ “own conventions, expectations, and interaction orders” (). TikTok’s distinct features, such as stitches, duets, and green screens, foster creative practices that invite communicative environments prioritizing “meaningful self-expression and sense-making of others and otherness” (Schellewald, 2021, p. 1451).
For Jewish creators, this dynamic of racialized and minoritized visibility takes on a distinct diasporic dimension, where platforms both reproduce inequalities and open up new possibilities for ethno-religious culture making. By collapsing physical distance, digital platforms enable dispersed communities to build participatory cultural repertoires, echoing McLuhan’s (1994) vision of the “global village.” We argue that TikTok universalizes and liberalizes time and space, shaping how Jewish creators transform diasporic separation into forms of networked togetherness. Local practices—whether lighting Shabbat candles in London or joking about Passover cleaning in New York—are spectacularized and reframed as content that resonates instantly with audiences across the globe. In this sense, platforms are much more than information mediators; platform governance and algorithmic structures actively shape how ethno-religious groups cultivate culture, engage in community building, and foster interreligious dialogue (Tsuria, 2020; Tsuria and Campbell, 2021).
Against this backdrop, we ask how Jewish creators navigate platform affordances and governance to cultivate visibility, resist online oppression, and combat harassment within TikTok’s precarious creator economy. To address this, we first draw on the concept of entrepreneurial labor (Neff, 2012) to highlight creators’ acceptance of uncertainty and the blurring of work-life boundaries as defining norms of platform work. We then extend with scholarship on the intermingling of identity formation and labor in digital spaces (; ) to explore how niche creators cultivate community while resisting biased algorithmic spaces. Building on this, we turn to the layered practices of ethnoreligious creators, who balance the aesthetic appeal of packaging identity for broad audiences within platform constraints. Finally, we draw attention to the interplay of identity, visibility, and infrastructural risk, foregrounding how platform architectures—through their affordances and governance mechanisms—shape what ethnoreligious creators can and cannot do online.
Our study centers on the lived experiences of TikTok creators who center their Jewish identity within content production. These creators operate within #JewTok—a dedicated space for Jewish content creation on TikTok—to promote a variety of Jewish identities who aim to celebrate, educate, and engage with religion, ethnicity, and tradition (). Within this digital space, creators participate in a multitude of creative labor; creating identity-driven content to niche and broad audiences, while producing defensive content that counters hate, including online antisemitism (Weimann and Masri, 2022). TikTok offers a particularly generative site for examining this dynamic, as its affordances connect creators across diverse political, social, and demographic publics () while also enabling the optimization of visibility, branding, and entrepreneurial labor (Neff, 2012).
To examine #JewTok creators’ nuanced entrepreneurial labor practices, we used a two-pronged digital ethnographic approach. This included a year-long ethnographic observation of 27 Jewish TikTok creator accounts, followed by semi-structured and in-depth interviews with 12 of our observed creators. Through this, we investigated #JewTok accounts as “dynamic workplaces” (Neff, 2012; ) where entrepreneurial labor and identity formation manifest as deeply intertwined practices. We engaged in qualitative content analysis of observational data and thematic analysis of interview data to deepen our understanding. Through this two-pronged approach we devise interrogate two themes: (1) #JewTok creators as “Jewish Ambassadors” through brokering culture and building community between Jewish and non-Jewish communities, as well as highlighting Judaism’s multifaceted nature and the struggles of fighting antisemitism; (2) as expressing “Jewish Hardship” by revealing algorithmic harm and sharing practices of resilience and resistance.
Through this analytical approach, we illuminate how digital subcommunities navigate platform governance while crafting a cultural brand. We contribute to entrepreneurial and identity labor literature by showing that identity-based labor on TikTok is ambivalent: it offers possibilities for education, belonging, and cultural brokerage, yet it is also shaped by heightened risks of stereotyping, spectacle, and surveillance. Furthermore, we demonstrate how the cultivation of ethno-religious community on TikTok presents unique challenges to entrepreneurial labor, including the need for additive labor; including constant optimization of platform affordances, the emotional toll of repeated moderation battles, and the precarity of visibility itself. We conclude that the case of #JewTok teaches us about the double-edged nature of platforms for minoritized communities. Platforms can serve as vital sites of cultural continuity while exposing creators to structural inequities. A better understanding of these dynamics should inform how platforms conceptualize and design governance, moderation, and responsibility toward vulnerable groups who rely on them for connection and representation.
Literature review
Entrepreneurial and identity labor in the creator economy
The creator economy redefines cultural production as entrepreneurship, where individuals transform their skills, personalities, and presence into monetizable assets. This transformation rests on sustained, strategic, and often invisible labor—from content creation and audience cultivation to platform navigation and brand management—that turns creative expression into ongoing work (). Creative work is largely aspirational, or what , p. 443) describes as a “forward-looking, carefully orchestrated, and entrepreneurial form of creative cultural production,” undertaken in the hope of future economic and professional rewards. Many creators come to regard this uncertainty as an acceptable, even worthwhile, condition of pursuing their creative autonomy and visibility rather than an inherent condition of platformized creative labor.
Neff’s (2012) concept of entrepreneurial labor captures this tension, describing workers who value career flexibility and innovation in creative industries, often at the expense of job security, predictable income, and work–life boundaries. This form of entrepreneurial labor within digital environments blurs the line between self-expression and professional work, making identity a marketable asset for creators. However, entrepreneurial labor is both aspirational and exploitative. It promises autonomy, authenticity, and creative fulfillment, yet simultaneously normalizes precarity, self-exploitation, and constant visibility (; ). Further pressure is added as creators independently shoulder financial risks, cultivate their own audiences, and manage brand strategies—all while navigating opaque and ever-changing platform governance.
Building on this entanglement of work and self, the creator economy turns identity itself into an extractable and marketable asset. Creator practices reveal how this asset is constructed, maintained, and leveraged as part of their professional success. Self-branding becomes a form of identity work—an ongoing deliberate action to cultivate, present, and maintain a legible image of oneself (; Schwalbe and Mason-Schrock, 1996) but also validate an individual’s interpretation of who they understand themselves to be (; Snow and Anderson, 1987). On platforms like TikTok, this labor is performative, relational, and interactive, demanding that creators continually adapt their identities to audience expectations, aesthetics, and monetization strategies (Turvy, 2025). For marginalized creators, this identity work is intensified with visibility being both a tool for community-building and a vector for harassment—putting themselves out there opens them up to increased risks to be viewed by the “wrong” audiences (, ).
The entrepreneurial creator economy is not monolithic () but structured by deep inequalities in how social and political identities are performed, valued, and rewarded (; ). Platforms reproduce the hierarchies of traditional creative industries, privileging whiteness, heteronormativity, and classed forms of visibility via biased algorithms and uneven pay (; , ; ). These governance logics render dominant identities more market-friendly, boosting their visibility and economic viability while marginalizing others. Under these conditions, algorithmic visibility becomes an economic imperative for creators with marginalized identities, who must continually “negotiate” and adapt their self-presentation to remain viable within platform entrepreneurial marketplaces (). For example, Black creators weigh financial and social risks when posting about Black Lives Matter under conditions of shadowbanning and adverse audience reactions (), while queer influencers calibrate how openly to express their sexuality in order to sustain a “heteronormative self-brand,” which is popularly rewarded with algorithmic visibility and thus entrepreneurial success (, p. 627). These dynamics generate heightened affective and algorithmic precarity, in which identity itself becomes an entrepreneurial asset with uneven value across the creator economy, forming the backdrop for understanding the vulnerabilities faced by Jewish content creators.
Against this backdrop of unequal visibility and precarity, entrepreneurial structures link content creation, identity, and labor. This creatrepreneurship () highlights the structural and material resources that enable creative ventures, while an identity-work perspective emphasizes the ongoing affective, relational, and representational labor through which those ventures are enacted and sustained. In other words, creatrepreneurship explains what the business of being a creator looks like; identity work explains how the creator continually (re)makes themselves as its core product. Entrepreneurial labor is pertinent to studying Jewish creators, whose self-branding of identity-work, and ethnoreligious visibility are entwined on TikTok. #JewTok creators negotiate the double demand of sustaining their livelihoods through platform logics while simultaneously performing and preserving cultural identity in spaces where both visibility and marginalization are algorithmically produced (Salhi and Goldhorn, 2023). Their practices exemplify how the creator economy operates not only as a marketplace but as a contested site of cultural representation and survival. With this in mind, the next section situates Jewish TikTok creators within broader ethnoreligious communities navigating the creator economy at the intersection of tradition, representation, and entrepreneurial selfhood.
Ethnoreligious creator communities
Ethnoreligious creators are creators whose content is tied to their religious, ethnic, and cultural heritage, and as such they navigate the creator economy under distinctive pressures shaped by the visibility of their identities (Mohyeddin, 2024). Ethnoreligious creators’ contemporary visibility builds on a longer trajectory, since religion was one of the earliest domains to embrace digital media, with institutional actors adopting online platforms for worship, teaching, and ritual (). In the late 1990s and early 2000s, websites and forums were used by churches, synagogues, and mosques to reach diasporic publics (; Campbell, 2012). This shifted with the rise of religious “ambassadors” such as rabbis, priests, nuns, and pastors who began cultivating online followings via livestreamed sermons, devotional YouTube channels, and faith-based QandA sessions (). Their role exemplified how religious authority translated into digital mediation, creating new modes of legitimacy that were both anchored in institutional hierarchies and shaped by online publics (, ).
Building on this longer trajectory from institutional religious mediation to individualized creator labor, our inquiry into Jewish creators situates #JewTok within broader analyses of ethnoreligious platform enclaves. Adopting platform vernaculars, these creators’ labor articulate belonging, negotiate authority, and contest visibility via culturally resonant modes of expression (Neyazi and Tanabe, 2014). In such publics, digital media becomes a stage where identity is simultaneously performed and branded under layered pressures: sustaining authenticity for the in-group, translating traditions for wider audiences, and adapting to the platform’s demand for visibility through consistency, aesthetic polish, and algorithm-friendly formats. Platforms themselves intensify these dynamics, not only by amplifying discriminatory speech but also by embedding racial and ethnic stereotypes into their design (Nakamura, 2008). Yet they also create openings for marginalized groups to reshape public perception and reclaim authority (; ). Muslim lifestyle influencers on Instagram (Pramiyanti et al., 2022), Indigenous TikTok communities (), and LGBTQ Christian YouTubers () show how religious-cultural content strengthens solidarity within communities while also functioning as pedagogical work.
Jewish creators on TikTok exemplify these broader dynamics of ethnoreligious content creation. Because the economic value of entrepreneurial labor is structured around dominant identities, Jewish creators are algorithmically and economically disadvantaged as a minority group within platform systems shaped by white Christian hegemonic norms (Noble, 2018). As a result, they must engage in strategic and affective identity work to secure eyeballs (). Yet as that attention accumulates, harassment and risk are unevenly distributed across Jewish creators. This asymmetry is intensified by the intersectional composition of Jewish communities, whose members report uneven moderation, exposure to antisemitic harassment (Weimann and Masri, 2022), and volatile content flows that can rapidly amplify hostility (). These dynamics include the layered forms of algorithmic and social discrimination faced by Jewish creators of color, political differences within Jewish publics, such as positions on Zionism, that expose creators to backlash from both Jewish and non Jewish audiences (Pistone and Rudberg, 2024), and cultural and ethnic differences among Ashkenazi, Sephardic, and Mizrahi creators that shape how antisemitism is encountered and endured.
When identity becomes the medium through which a creator’s brand operates, entrepreneurial labor extends beyond productivity into the most intimate dimensions of selfhood, transforming cultural and religious belonging into a commodified resource. At the same time, this process also enables collective formations such as #JewTok, where Jewishness is not only marketed but actively produced, debated, and defended. Platform affordances and governance mechanisms therefore do more than distribute attention; they shape which forms of ethnoreligious expression become legible, legitimate, and sustainable. Within this landscape, the intersectional character of Jewish identity further structures whose voices gain visibility, whose are contested, and whose are marginalized.
Platform affordances, governance, and algorithmic harm
Ethnoreligious creators’ practices are shaped by the infrastructures that host them. Platform affordances—the technical and social possibilities embedded in platform design (; )—both enable and constrain how religious-cultural expression is created and circulated. TikTok’s affordances enable users to engage in social movements, identity, and information sharing at scale (; ), such as climate activists drawing on TikTok’s affordances of imitation and replication to reach diverse audiences (), as well as healthcare workers’ adoption of TikTok’s playful tone via memes and lip-sync videos to spread accurate information about COVID-19 (Southerton, 2021). Further, TikTok features such as the For You Page, duets, stitches, and trending sounds provide pathways to rapid visibility and creative collaboration, extending reach beyond immediate communities ().
Yet these same conditions shape not only the scale of creator exposure but also the form of attention they receive—often amplifying harassment, stereotyping, or misrecognition. While TikTok’s algorithmic amplification expands ethnoreligious followership by pushing content into broader publics, it simultaneously renders creators vulnerable to hostility and the pressure to conform to sensationalist or polarizing tropes as an engagement tactic (). Similar studies have focused on how Muslim women in the Middle East negotiate modesty and visibility in their content while facing gendered, religious scrutiny (), and Black creators in the United States contend with algorithmic bias and the appropriation of their work (). These examples show how creators from ethnoreligious and racialized communities negotiate the intersections of entrepreneurial labor, cultural identity, and visibility, sustaining presence through platform affordances even as they contend with algorithmic harms.
Within this, Jewish creators make Jewish culture visible through educational-entertainment hybrids, while resisting reductive framings of Jewishness and confronting unique risks: antisemitic harassment, digital misrepresentation, and algorithmically mediated suppression. Given TikTok’s multimodality and affordances, antisemitic harassment of Jewish creators often involves the weaponization of texts, symbols, songs, videos, jokes, caricatures, usernames, and other expressive forms to reinforce antisemitic tropes (Weimann and Masri, 2022). This includes the circulation of viral hashtags promoting Holocaust denial (for example, #HoloHoax) and the remixing of antisemitic stereotypes into meme culture, where supposedly humorous formats—such as repackaged versions of the Happy Merchant meme—are deployed to normalize conspiracies of global Jewish control ().
Platform governance—the policies, algorithms, and moderation systems that regulate content ()—further influence and enforce these dynamics. Despite public commitments to fairness and protection against hate speech, content moderation frequently fails to capture subtle, coded, or context-specific discrimination (Noble, 2018; Are, 2022; ; Rauchberg, 2025). Moreover, tech companies have increasingly depleted their trust and safety teams, leaving them with fewer experts equipped with the contextual and technical knowledge needed to address the complexities of hate (Moran et al., 2025). Such harms echo broader critiques of algorithmic bias, where digital infrastructures reproduce entrenched social inequalities rather than neutralize them, embedding racism, antisemitism, and Islamophobia into platform logics (Matamoros-Fernández and Farkas, 2021; Riedl et al., 2024).
In response, creators—particularly those from marginalized groups—turn to forms of algorithmic resistance (), experimenting with tactics to evade suppression, exploit recommendation logics, and mobilize hashtags to reclaim visibility. These strategies are often collective, from coordinated liking and commenting to amplify reach, to practices such as “passing the mic,” where mainstream influencers temporarily hand over their accounts to marginalized voices (). Yet despite TikTok’s public claims of fairness, reports of discrimination are frequently dismissed or deflected, a governance gap that describe as platform gaslighting, in which ignored complaints of harassment or bias undermine trust in moderation. Algorithmic resistance thus becomes not simply optional but essential to identity-based entrepreneurial labor, as technical systems actively constrain and suppress creators’ presence.
Given this context, we examine how Jewish creators mobilize TikTok’s affordances to counter antisemitism, cultivate intercultural understanding, and negotiate accountability within digital infrastructures. We therefore ask two interrelated questions: (1) How do Jewish TikTok creators manage visibility as they navigate platform affordances and governance systems? and (2) What challenges, opportunities, and constraints shape Jewish creators as they engage in entrepreneurial labor within TikTok’s creator economy?
Methods
Data collection
Our study combines ethnographic observation and interviews to examine the entrepreneurial labor of Jewish creators. Over 12 months, we systematically observed the TikTok activity of 27 creators, approaching their profiles as “dynamic workplaces” (Neff, 2012; ) where entrepreneurial practices, identity performances, and engagements with platform affordances materialize. Following traditions of digital ethnography as an iterative, situated, and processual mode of inquiry (Pink et al., 2016), we treated profiles as evolving sites of cultural production, shaped by TikTok’s sociotechnical conditions of visibility. Our work involved repeated walkthroughs of creators’ work, comment threads, and live streams, alongside attention to For You Page recommendations. We traced how identity performance evolved over time, with observations documented via fieldnotes, screenshots, and bookmarked videos, attending to what Pink et al. (2016) describe as “meaning-making in practice.”
Within these profiles, we set our critical inquiry towards videos, captions, hashtags, sounds, and audience interactions as central units of analysis. Following affordance scholarship (), we paid attention to how creators mobilize TikTok’s features, including stitches, duets, live-streams, and participation in trends, as key sites of labor, visibility, community, and identity. Affordances were examined as both enabling and constraining; they offer creative tools for expression and networked visibility, while exposing creators to algorithmic precarity. Thus, our choice of TikTok is intentional. The platform’s algorithmic recommendation system, participatory affordances, and moderation practices make it a revealing site for examining how ethnoreligious identity, visibility, and precarity are produced and contested in creator work. We were also embedded for an extended period in creator communities that had been documenting their platform struggles. At the same time, because these governance dynamics change rapidly, our 12-month observation period captures a specific moment of platform governance and creator precarity rather than a universal condition.
To deepen these observations, we conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 12 creators. Such interviews are particularly useful in digital labor research () because they capture behind-the-scenes dimensions of creator work that are not readily observable in-platform, including emotional labor, perceptions of governance, and relationships with audiences. The interviews generated detailed accounts of creators’ routines, strategies for navigating identity work, and experiences of content moderation and community dynamics. While self-reported data can involve selective and strategic self-framing, these subjective accounts are analytically central to our study, which focuses on how creators understand, narrate, and navigate platformed identity and visibility.
Data sampling
Recruitment was facilitated through a private Facebook group established in 2020, with roughly 1,500 members voicing concerns about TikTok’s moderation practices around Jewish-related topics. The group’s facilitator granted permission, and in line with AoIR’s ethical guidelines, the researchers respected the contextual integrity of the community (). The group functions as a grassroots infrastructure where creators share experiences of takedowns, shadowbanning, and circumvention strategies. From this group, we identified 27 distinct creators, selected based on three criteria: (1) sustained activity on TikTok, defined as at least 6 months of regular posting; (2) explicit engagement with Jewish identity in their content; and (3) thematic diversity spanning activism, education, religion, humor, explanatory content, culture, and related domains.
While we use #JewTok as a shorthand for a broader field of Jewish TikTok activity, we do not treat it as a single or bounded hashtag community. Instead, we examine an ethnoreligious creator ecology identified via hashtag tracking, platform ethnography, and participation in this Facebook group. Because this group centers on moderation struggles, our sample likely overrepresents creators who have experienced takedowns, shadowbanning, or harassment, capturing those most affected by platform governance rather than the full spectrum of Jewish creators on TikTok. For each of the 27 profiles, we built a corpus of 20 to 50 videos sampled across different phases of activity. Using a purposive strategy, we selected analytically salient cases that illuminated ethnoreligious entrepreneurial labor, including posts engaging platform affordances, audience negotiation, and moderation or visibility struggles. All materials came from public accounts, with identifying details blurred and no personal data retained.
To complement our content analysis, we contacted all 27 creators via direct message. Twelve agreed to participate and provided informed consent. The interviews designed to elicit detailed accounts of their creative routines (e.g., posting schedules, content planning, and use of TikTok features), strategies for navigating identity (such as negotiating Jewish visibility, humor, or religious performance), experiences of moderation (including content takedowns, shadowbanning, and reporting practices), and the affective dynamics of community-building (for instance, fostering solidarity through comment interactions or live-streams). The participants reflected both geographic and thematic diversity, with interviewees based in Germany (3), the United States (5), Israel (3), and the United Kingdom (4).
Data analysis
Our approach combined content analysis of TikTok videos with thematic coding of interviews. For the content analysis, we adopted an abductive coding strategy (Timmermans and Tavory, 2012), selecting videos iteratively and refining categories across multiple coding rounds. We focused on five analytic dimensions: entrepreneurial strategies (branding rhetorics, collaborations, and efforts to render identity work marketable); identity performances (religious, activist, cultural, and humorous framings of Jewishness); affordance use (duets, stitches, hashtags, live-streams, and sound reuse); platform negotiations (responses to content removal, shadowbanning, and moderation workarounds); and audience engagement (comment interactions, parasocial cues, and community-building practices).
These same analytic dimensions also guided our interview coding, where they were operationalized into thematic blocks addressing creators’ everyday routines of content production, experiences with moderation, strategies for managing audiences, and reflections on Jewish identity and their affective labor. While some visibility tactics generate high levels of interaction, suggesting practical success, we do not evaluate their effectiveness in terms of reach or sustainability. Instead, we analyze how creators understand and deploy these strategies under conditions of platformed precarity.
By triangulating insights from videos and interviews, we traced the dynamics shaping Jewish creators’ entrepreneurial and identity labor. These analytic lenses directly informed the findings, where we highlight two central dynamics: Jewish Ambassadorship—identity-driven cultural brokerage, community-building, religious exploration, and justice advocacy—and Jewish Hardship—narratives of algorithmic antisemitism, surveillance, and the precarity of visibility on TikTok. While our analysis attends closely to emotional strain as it is narrated by creators, we do not treat these as clinically measurable psychological states.
Our team brings both scholarly and lived experience to this project. All four authors identify as Jewish. Together, we draw on long-standing expertise in religion, digital culture, and platform governance, alongside cumulative personal and professional experiences of navigating Jewish identity, antisemitism, and online visibility, including how Jewishness is mobilized and politicized through our names. This positionality shaped our sensitivity to the affective, political, and ethical stakes of ethnoreligious expression on TikTok, while also requiring ongoing reflexivity in how we interpreted creators’ narratives, platform dynamics, and our own positions within these mediated fields.
Findings
Jewish Ambassadorship
We define Jewish Ambassadorship as a form of identity-driven labor that turns individual expression into a broader project of visible cultural mediation and advocacy in algorithmically mediated spaces. These practices unfold across four interrelated dimensions. As cultural brokers, Jewish creators render rituals, traditions, and everyday practices legible to predominantly non-Jewish audiences, often through explainer-style or lifestyle-oriented videos. As community builders, they cultivate belonging and interfaith dialogue, leveraging TikTok affordances such as duets and stitches to bridge cultural and religious divides. As religious explorers, they adopt influencer vernaculars to unpack the multifaceted nature of Jewishness, highlighting its diversity and resisting reductive framings. And as justice advocates, they mobilize platform-native tools—voiceovers, memes, sound reuse, and challenges—to counter antisemitism and stereotypes, while spotlighting the algorithmic dynamics that amplify harm.
Cultural brokers
First, we see Jewish creators, as part of their ambassadorship role as cultural brokers, strategically branding themselves as guides and representatives of Jewish life on TikTok. In one example, a U. S.-based creator presents herself as a “Jewish mentor,” offering practical advice for non-Jewish audiences on how to accommodate Jewish friends—ranging from making a home “more kosher,” to knowing which restaurant chains are suitable, to observing everyday practices (see Figure 1). Such branding rhetoric is reinforced through collaborations with Jewish food and clothing brands, as well as by recommending and amplifying the work of other Jewish creators (see Figure 2). In doing so, creators cross-promote content and consolidate Jewish ambassadorship as a recognizable, and at times monetizable, niche.
Figure 1
Figure 2
This form of cultural ambassadorship aligns with what , p. 2) theorize as migrant digital brokerage on TikTok, where Filipino creators “serve as connectors between formal regulatory systems, the market dynamics of migration, and the social lives of student migrants.” Similarly, Jewish creators broker between religious knowledge, diverse publics, and platform logics, translating Jewish life into algorithmically circulable forms. The brokerage is enacted via layered identity performances: some foreground religious practices such as holiday rituals, dietary observance, or immersion in the mikvah, while others translate these practices via familiar secular analogies, such as likening tefillin to a GoPro camera (see Figure 3). Others adopt playful or trend based registers that render cultural belonging approachable and shareable. Across these registers Jewish identity is never incidental but strategically crafted to remain legible within a platform ecology where visibility depends on recognizable forms of self presentation. The additive brokerage labor exposes how marginalized identity creators must work harder to become visible in algorithmic systems that are already tilted toward dominant identities (; ).
Figure 3
Building on these performances, the cultural brokerage function is amplified through platform affordances. #JewTok creators see the possibility of TikTok affordances as opportunities to embed Jewish narratives into the app. For example, one creator used TikTok’s “stitch” function—a tool that lets users clip and directly respond to another video—as a mechanism of pedagogy and resistance. The original clip circulated an antisemitic meme mocking Jewish men, where the focus on their traditional clothing was used to signal a familiar antisemitic stereotype. By stitching this clip, the creator inserted themselves immediately after the offensive material, layering it with humorous commentary. In doing so, the creator redirected audience attention away from the meme’s hostility and toward cultural explanation and critique, transforming the affordance into a means of counter-speech and community education (see Figure 4). This connective quality is enabled also with the “duet,” which allows users to bridge content and foster interreligious dialogue. For instance, a duet between a Jewish and a Muslim creator spotlighted shared traditions, such as the prohibition of pork, prompting a viral challenge where users contributed their own parallel experiences (see Figure 5).
Figure 4
Figure 5
The indexicality and discoverability of hashtags further expand this brokerage work. Hashtags like #AskAJew or #ShabbatTok operate as cultural gateways, inviting non-Jewish audiences to engage with Jewish life through searchable content that transforms scattered videos into visible cultural clusters. Hashtags mark content as “Jewish” and position it within TikTok’s algorithmic ecosystem, where visibility depends on strategic tagging and circulation. Live-streams, meanwhile, extend brokerage into synchronous encounters, where creators host open QandA sessions that blur the line between religious lesson, cultural translation, and casual conversation. One U. K. creator explicitly framed his use of TikTok Lives as “teaching Shabbat 101 to anyone curious,” transforming the affordance into a classroom that positioned him simultaneously as educator, performer, and cultural ambassador (see Figure 6). Through these affordances, Jewish ambassadorship leverages platform logics to expand visibility among Jewish and non-Jewish publics, showing how platforms structure not only who becomes visible but how that visibility must be sustained through identity-driven labor.
Figure 6
Community builders
Secondly, we see Jewish creators’ ambassadorship as community builders, weaving dispersed audiences into collective belonging, where “Jewish togetherness” is both represented and actively lived. This community-building unfolds via entrepreneurial strategies that innovatively brand the creator as a communal anchor, with creators being “Jewish friend,” “Jewish sister,” or “Jewish auntie”—familiar extensions of Jewish family life in digital form. This branding draws on the aesthetics of warmth, humor, and everyday familiarity, where videos about mundane Jewish challenges, such as the social pressure of matchmaking or the gendered expectations placed on women in religious communities (see Figure 7), become entry points for collective recognition.
Figure 7
Identity performances deepen this labor by amplifying shared tropes and affect. Humor is key, often centered on moments that “only Jews can understand”—the chaos of Passover cleaning, the awkwardness of explaining Jewish holidays or kosher restrictions at school or work, and the small frictions of daily observance (see Figure 8). These performances surface the tensions and inequalities that shape Jewish life while simultaneously generating solidarity, reinforcing the sense that “we are all in this together.” For example, one female creator built a series around the intrusive and inappropriate questions so often directed at Jewish women, responding through a trending dance challenge where users display the most common questions they are asked (see Figure 9).
Figure 8
Figure 9
TikTok’s capacity for enabling creators to organize and label videos around distinctive themes, allows them to build their profiles as repositories of Jewish identity that function as living sources of knowledge—layering together Jewish life across diverse communities, such as those in the U. S. (see Figure 10). We see how Live-streams then function for Jewish creators as communal hubs, accommodating shared rituals—lighting Shabbat candles, singing Hebrew songs, or discussing the weekly Torah portion (see Figure 11). Thus, even through a screen, participation in these live sessions evokes gathering around a communal table, transforming TikTok into a space of Jewish togetherness.
Figure 10
Figure 11
Audience engagement completes this cycle as comment sections become distinctive arenas of communal storytelling. Users cultivate a Jewish community by layering additional dimensions of identity, such as sharing challah recipes, debating tradition, and exchanging anecdotes about family life. In one case, a user duetted a female creator’s video, writing she was “vibing with my fellow Jewish sister,” amplifying her response to invasive questions about Jewish women’s lives and reframing it as an act of solidarity and empowerment (see Figure 12). Creators build on this participation with video replies, transforming scattered contributions into collective conversations. In this way, TikTok becomes a communal archive and dynamic identity hub, where Jewish traditions, struggles, and everyday humor are re-performed and re-circulated through platform logics that shape how continuity, intimacy, and connection are algorithmically sustained.
Figure 12
Religious explorers
Thirdly, we see Jewish creators as part of their ambassadorship role as religious explorers. Here, they position TikTok not as a stage for outward translation or broader communal recognition, but as a laboratory for experimenting with and reinterpreting Jewish tradition. While cultural brokerage makes Jewish life legible to non-Jewish audiences, and community-building fosters solidarity among Jewish users, religious exploration is about testing boundaries, reworking rituals, and showcasing the diversity of Jewish practice in ways that are often playful, provocative, and experimental.
Entrepreneurial strategies in this register frame creators less as anchors and more as curators. Their profiles function like digital studios where content is packaged as tutorials, experiments, or aesthetic journeys into practice. One U. S. creator, for example, produced a series called “Shabbat hacks” that reimagined ritual observance for dorm rooms and apartments with limited space, positioning himself as what he describes in his bio as an innovator of practice (see Figure 13). Another creator was seen leaning on wellness aesthetics, branding mikva immersion as part of a “self-care reset,” blending spiritual ritual with influencer vernacular of body and lifestyle.
Figure 13
Identity performances in religious exploration resist singular definitions of what Judaism “should” look like. They produce identity-focused tutorials that unpack Judaism’s multifaceted nature, resisting reductive, monolithic representations. Some creators juxtapose Orthodox, Conservative, and secular practices, while others foreground Mizrahi and Ethiopian traditions that are often sidelined in mainstream discourse. Gender and sexuality become further sites of exploration, with women performing rituals historically reserved for men, and queer creators reimagining blessings in inclusive language. Still others experiment with hybrid identities, such as presenting themselves as “Muslim Jews,” to complicate conventional boundaries and expand the spectrum of what Jewishness can mean (see Figure 14). These performances illuminate Jewish diversity not as heritage preservation but as lived multiplicity, emphasizing that Jewishness is a field of ongoing interpretation.
Figure 14
Platform affordances amplify this exploration. Rather than serving the work of translation for outsiders or reinforcing internal bonds, TikTok’s affordances enable experimentation and creative play. For example, trending audio is reworked into musical backdrops for Hebrew prayers, infusing devotional practice with platform-native aesthetics. Transition effects are deployed to produce “day in the life” montages of keeping kosher in unexpected settings such as airports or dormitories. At the same time, filters are repurposed to dramatize the gap between “expectation” and “reality” in ritual practice. One creator used a popular transformation filter to spectacularize their Jewishness by wearing a keffiyeh, styling it through the aesthetics of a fashion reveal while noting that this choice often prompts others to question their identity, even though both the keffiyeh and traditional Jewish coverings serve similar purposes as headwear (see Figure 15). Jewish creators’ exploration and creativity are both guided by and beholden to platform affordances—showing how creativity practiced within identity driven labor unfolds in, and is limited by, inequitable algorithmic environments.
Figure 15
Justice advocates
Finally, we see Jewish creator s as part of their ambassadorship role as justice advocates. Here, creators mobilize TikTok as a stage for confrontation and repair, positioning their content as interventions into antisemitism and broader equity struggles. Unlike cultural brokerage, which emphasizes translation for outsiders, or community-building, which fosters solidarity within Jewish audiences, justice advocacy is outward-facing and oppositional. It directs attention to moments of misrepresentation, hate speech, or erasure, and uses platform-native creativity to contest them. Within the role of justice advocates, creators engage in a form of oppositional platform labor—using the same affordances that amplify antisemitism to instead intervene and fight against its circulation (Riedl et al., 2024).
Entrepreneurial strategies in this register frame advocacy as a form of purposeful self-branding and marketable identity work. Creators position themselves as advocates, curating profile identities around slogans, justice-oriented hashtags, or recurring campaign formats such as “myth-busting Mondays” or “Antisemitism explained.” Merchandise links, Patreon pages, and cross-platform branding extend some of this labor, turning advocacy into a recognizable, consumable, and shareable niche product. Their entrepreneurial positioning also relies on consistency and recognizability, with profile images featuring protest signs, bios declaring “fighting antisemitism one TikTok at a time,” and pinned videos that introduce the creator’s mission, such as building coalitions under the motto “We’re stronger together” (see Figure 16). These strategies signal to audiences that following Jewish creators is not a passive act but a way of aligning with a cause. Through this, entrepreneurial labor is expanded into a dialogic identity performance where creators and users co-create political meaning-making.
Figure 16
Identity performances of Jewish creators are framed around correcting misconceptions and dismantling stereotypes. Creators challenge tropes of Jewish greed, global control, or dual loyalty by staging counter-narratives in visually engaging ways, using humor, satire, or affective storytelling to challenge antisemitism (see Figure 17). A common technique juxtaposes antisemitic comments with clips of Jewish life—family gatherings, ritual observance, or humor—undercutting hate with the ordinariness and diversity of Jewish experience. By foregrounding both shared and divergent experiences of antisemitism, Jewish creators give empirical weight to claim that the creator economy is not “monolithic,” particularly in how identity and labor are organized and valued. Their practices show how ethnoreligious creators encounter distinct constraints and risks within platform structures that unevenly distribute visibility across marginalized groups ().
Figure 17
Others extend this labor by aligning Jewish struggles with other marginalized groups, situating antisemitism within an intersectional framework of racism, sexism, and homophobia. In the context of the war in Gaza (2023–2025), for instance, creators directly confront antisemitic comments accusing Jews of complicity in state violence. They respond by distinguishing Jewish identity from the Israeli government, staging counter-narratives that emphasize solidarity with Palestinians, militarism critique, and the refusal letting Jewishness be equated with occupation (see Figure 18). This entrepreneurial work illustrates the unique risks facing ethnoreligious creators, showing how visibility renders them vulnerable to multi-dimensional hate shaped by interlocking algorithmic discriminations (Noble, 2018).
Figure 18
Affordances themselves become tools of resistance in this process. Creators mobilize TikTok’s visual features—using green screens and filters to resist hate comments and insert themselves into heroic Jewish figures such as Rabbi Akiva—to dramatize resilience and heritage (see Figure 19). These performances recast Jewish identity not only as ordinary but also as courageous, wise, and enduring, producing affective counterweights to the demeaning stereotypes they contest. Other creators harness features such as voiceovers, audio memes, and dance challenges for the principalization of social justice, transforming platform-native formats into vehicles for advocacy and cultural expression. One example involves a creator responding to Kanye West—whose openly antisemitic remarks circulated widely—by exposing what she calls the “Kanye West effect.” Using TikTok features such as green screen, duet, overlay text, and images, she builds an educational walkthrough of Jewish and Black histories. By reframing Kanye’s hostility through humor and irony, the creator deflates its power and transforms the moment into resistance and a collective refusal to take hate at face value (see Figure 19).
Figure 19
Platform negotiations are especially acute for justice advocates, since content calling out antisemitism is often flagged or removed under community guidelines, while the original hateful content circulates unchecked (; ). We conceptualize this as “algorithmic antisemitism,” a dynamic—explored further in the next section—in which algorithms simultaneously amplify harmful narratives and constrain efforts to resist them. Crucially, these struggles spill into the participatory spaces of TikTok. Audience engagement becomes the extension of advocacy, as comment sections turn into rallying grounds where users share their antisemitism experiences, offer solidarity, or coordinate reporting campaigns against harmful accounts. Through these forms of entrepreneurial labor, creators sustain collective resistance and recast TikTok as a contested arena of visibility, where antisemitism is rendered legible, contestable, and politically actionable.
Jewish hardship
TikTok provides Jewish creators with opportunities for visibility, empowerment, and cultural expression. However, our interviews reveal how these same affordances can also facilitate harmful practices and reinforce technological barriers. Whereas the previous section drew on content analysis to highlight ambassadorial practices, here we turn to interview data to foreground creators’ lived experiences. We frame this second identified dynamic of entrepreneurial labor as Jewish hardship. Based on these accounts, we conceptualize two recurring tensions: the first being algorithmic antisemitism and the second a form of religious panopticon. These tensions show that, unlike dominant-identity creators who benefit from algorithmically favored visibility, marginalized identity creators face entrepreneurial labor disproportionately shaped by suppression, hostility, and precarity.
Algorithmic antisemitism
The first tension, algorithmic antisemitism, captures the structural tendency of TikTok’s moderation systems to suppress Jewish content while amplifying harmful speech from bad-faith actors. As Noble (2018) reminds us, algorithms reproduce dominant societal norms, and this becomes evident when Jewish creators find their posts disproportionately flagged, removed, or hidden. Interviewees repeatedly noted how reporting antisemitic content was met with platform messages stating that the posts “did not violate community guidelines,” even when the content was overtly hostile. This recurring pattern aligns with what term platform gaslighting, whereby moderation infrastructures systematically delegitimize creators’ efforts to resist antisemitism.
This tension between visibility and suppression is most starkly captured in the accounts of creators who find that their attempts at education and advocacy are treated with the same suspicion as the hate they are trying to contest. One creator explained the contradiction between creating educational content and being punished for it:
I made a video breaking down the history of antisemitic stereotypes, explaining where they come from and why they’re dangerous. Within less than an hour, it was removed for “hate speech.” The irony is unbearable because when I teach about hate, I get silenced, but when someone uploads the actual hate video, it stays up, gathering views. It's like TikTok itself can’t tell the difference between educating and inciting.
What makes these moments destabilizing is not only the immediate removal of content but also the silencing of Jewish creators’ efforts to define and express their identity on their own terms. In these cases, acts of Jewish self-definition and critical pedagogy are rendered algorithmically illegible. In practice, TikTok collapses context, failing to recognize the difference between those who weaponize stereotypes and those who dismantle them. The result is a form of double injury—creators are exposed to antisemitism and, at the same time, disciplined for resisting it. Another creator recounted the asymmetry of moderation in stark terms:
I stitched a Holocaust denial video and calmly explained why it was false, citing facts and showing sources (...) my video was taken down almost immediately for violating guidelines, while the denialist content was still circulating days later with thousands of likes. So like the message is clear - context and correction are treated as dangerous, while raw denial or antisemitism is tolerated. It’s as if the algorithm prioritizes the sensationalism of hate over the nuance of explanation. I just CANNOT understand that.
Creators’ experiences demonstrate that the asymmetry of moderation is not random but structurally patterned. Corrective speech, even when carefully grounded in evidence, is far more vulnerable to removal than inflammatory content. This imbalance reflects what creators describe as the algorithm’s preference for spectacle over context, privileging virality at the expense of nuance. We argue it creates a perverse incentive structure where hate remains more visible and more profitable for the platform than resistance. One creator highlighted the exhausting affective burden of this:
Every time I upload something even slightly political or historical, I’m bracing myself. Will it be taken down? Will I be shadowbanned for a week? I’m constantly second-guessing how to phrase things, whether to add Hebrew subtitles, and whether I need a backup account. It’s draining to live in this state of hyper-awareness, like you’re negotiating your existence with a machine that never sees you fully as human. We mean good.
Yet creators do not simply passively endure this asymmetry. Jewish hardship is also negotiated via platform adaptations, as creators devise strategies to navigate and outmaneuver algorithmic suppression. Moderation challenges force them to develop workarounds, often by reframing content in ways that bypass automated detection. In one striking case, a creator documented how her video explaining antisemitic stereotypes was removed, only to be re-uploaded with Hebrew subtitles and coded language. She walked us through this experience:
So, if I want a video to stay up, I have to disguise my content. Sometimes that means adding Hebrew subtitles, sometimes it’s swapping out words for metaphors, sometimes I’ll blur text on the screen or break up phrases with emojis, so the system doesn’t catch them. Even the pacing of speech or the choice of background sound can make a difference. Over time, it has become increasingly about coding and embedding meaning in ways that slip past the algorithm, and the actual work we are here to do goes to waste. And the coding takes SO much labor. (...) every upload is a calculation of how do I hide this, tweak that, bend the language just enough so the platform won’t erase it. We smuggle knowledge through a checkpoint that doesn’t understand what it’s blocking. And yet, that’s the only way to make sure the message survives long enough for people to see it.
Moderation workarounds become part of hardship labor itself. Rather than merely technical maneuvers, creators extend the act of ambassadorship by ensuring that Jewish knowledge continues to circulate despite infrastructural silencing. Creators testified to strategies such as maintaining backup accounts, migrating videos that explain Jewish holidays and rituals to Instagram, and substituting sensitive keywords with coded alternatives, all of which illustrate how Jewish expression is kept alive under algorithmic pressure. One creator echoed this exhausting creativity sentiment:
I keep three versions of every video. If TikTok deletes one, I post the second with different words, and if that fails, I upload the third on Instagram, adapting it to the platform's vibe. You always have to play cat-and-mouse with the system. Sometimes I feel less like a creator and more like a codebreaker. I’m constantly asking myself what word will trigger the algorithm today, and how can I disguise it so the message still gets through?
Beyond these tactical edits, creators also draw on TikTok’s vernacular repertoires—viral sounds, dance challenges, and memetic templates—to reframe their suspensions with irony. One creator, for example, returned from a ban using Eminem’s “Without Me” with the line “Guess who’s back, back again,” turning the rhythm of disciplinary removal into a moment of shared humor and resilience (see Figure 20). Two other creators turned viral dances into recognizable choreographies of resistance, using them to draw attention to their ninth ban in just 2 weeks and to call out both algorithmic and human antisemitism on TikTok (see Figure 21). In doing so, they translate hardship labor into familiar platform idioms, making the struggle against moderation visible while simultaneously amplifying it as content.
Figure 20
Figure 21
In these participatory spaces, hardship labor takes on a collective form. Audience engagement becomes another arena of resilience, with comment sections turning into rallying grounds where hostility and solidarity collide. Creators are compelled to explain, defend, and reframe Jewishness in ways that both contest antisemitism and foster connection. Hostile comments often provoke ironic replies or satirical riffs, while supportive viewers share their own experiences of antisemitism or coordinate reporting campaigns against harmful accounts. Through parasocial cues—such as addressing viewers as “family” or “community”—these interactions evolve into sustained cultural exchanges, transforming what might have been fleeting posts into shared acts of endurance and belonging.
One creator, for example, stitched a user’s question about fasting on Yom Kippur and transformed it into a conversation about vulnerability, using humor to diffuse tension while reinforcing her role as a broker between religious tradition and secular audiences (see Figure 22). Another creator described the communal value of these interactions:
Figure 22
The comments are where I feel the most supported. People share their own stories, offer advice, or just say thank you for speaking up. It turns what could be a lonely fight into something collective, and we’re like a digital minyan where we show up for each other. The comments are where the real battle happens. My video is just the spark, but in the replies, you see people fighting, educating, and supporting each other. It feels less lonely when you know a thousand strangers are standing with you, or even confronting you.
These words reveal that, even amid hostility, a broader sense of communal support remains present. As these Jewish creators engage in entrepreneurial labor practices, they also shoulder additional labor—interpreting asymmetrical content moderation, devising tactics to navigate or counter these systemic biases, and circulating knowledge across Jewish creator networks. Building on this, we turn to examine how such interactions—supportive, educational, and antagonistic alike—unfold under the constant gaze of the algorithm.
Religious panopticon
Algorithmic antisemitism not only exposes Jewish creators to broader hostile audiences but also cultivates voyeurism and digital surveillance. This is a religious panopticon, the second form of hardship shaping creators’ experiences on the platform. Drawing on theorization of the panopticon as a disciplinary regime where visibility functions as control, we see how TikTok turns Jewish creators into objects of constant monitoring. What is framed as participation and visibility becomes instead a mechanism of regulation, where being watched is inseparable from being disciplined. Creators engaged in identity work often find themselves transformed into spectacles (), where attempts at education are consumed less as dialogue and more as entertainment, while feeling pressured to perform their identity in the “right” way, as one creator shared:
When I post about donning Tefillin or keeping kosher, like showing how I manage meals while traveling, the algorithm many times throws it to people who see it as bizarre. The comments make me feel like I’m in a zoo exhibit, with my rituals on display for mockery. What is normal and meaningful to me gets stripped of context and recycled as content for others, and I feel that the system amplifies that vibe rather than the meaning behind it.
Within this panoptic dynamic, creators described how their videos are pulled into harmful feedback loops, where visibility is driven by controversy and content meant to counter hate circulates mainly among hostile publics. Well-intentioned posts are thus pushed onto the wrong “side” of TikTok, reaching audiences primed to mock or attack rather than engage (Maddox and Gill, 2023). This reflects notion of the superpanopticon, in which digital infrastructures sort, monitor, and discipline subjects through regimes of observation. For Jewish creators, visibility becomes a trap as reach is secured through objectification, ridicule, and instrumentalization. As notes in the intimacy triple bind, marginalized creators are pushed to perform ever more in order to counter the very harm and misinformation that the platform’s dynamics amplify. One creator captured this contradiction bluntly:
When I post lighthearted content, it barely goes anywhere. But the moment I address antisemitism, the video explodes because trolls pile into the comments and tear me down. I know from experience that the algorithm rewards that chaos, and not the message itself (...) It feels like I’m trapped in a system that amplifies me for all the wrong reasons, as if my Jewishness is put on the shelf and I’m being watched with hostility because of it.
In this complex domain of identity work, creators’ intentions do not always align with audience interpretations. A video meant to explain the meaning of a holiday ritual, for instance, may spread widely not because it fosters understanding, but because it sparks voyeuristic curiosity or hostile commentary. As a result, Jewish creators must navigate constant surveillance of their entrepreneurial work while turning religion, heritage, and culture into the very content that sustains visibility. This tension is deeply invasive. One creator who posts about Jewish couplehood described how explaining the bedsheet custom as a nuanced practice within specific communities was met not with understanding but with dehumanizing comments that stripped away context and care:
I wanted to use my platform to dispel myths and show the real beauty and complexity of Jewish couples’ lives. But the moment I mentioned the bedsheet practice, the comments weren’t about culture or meaning anymore, they were about how Jews ‘really’ have sex. People wrote things like, ‘So do you all just poke holes in sheets?’ or ‘Do rabbis watch to make sure it happens?’ Others went further, joking about Jews being ‘breeding machines’ or saying we were too ‘primitive’ to know intimacy. It turns something intimate and spiritual into mockery, and it makes me feel like no matter how carefully I explain, I’ll still be reduced to a stereotype.
Creators also spoke about how their everyday lives online are pulled into surveillance, where intimacy is reframed as content and curiosity becomes intrusion. Like the algorithms, audiences also dehumanize. Another creator echoed this ambivalence, noting how even when she knows such comments generate engagement, it comes at the cost of feeling reduced to stereotypes:
I tried making a series about Jewish home life, simple things like how we bless food or set the table on Shabbat. Instead of curiosity or respect, I got flooded with comments asking if our marriages are arranged, or if women are ‘allowed’ to enjoy sex. And it's like suddenly my kitchen table wasn’t just my home but a stage where people demanded answers to fantasies and stereotypes. And I know the algorithm eats that up (...) those comments generate engagement, which means my video spreads wider. But it comes at a price for my culture to get reduced, and my privacy to feel invaded, and I’m actually rewarded not for what I wanted to share but for how mockable or exotic it seems to others. It’s exhausting because it’s not dialogue, and the system thrives on turning that intrusion into fuel.
In this sense, we argue, Jewishness is not only narrated but commodified, transformed into fodder for the attention economy (). The very mechanisms designed to reward visibility end up amplifying distortion, ensuring that what circulates most powerfully are not the creator’s intentions, but the stereotypes imposed upon them. This reveals a painful paradox: visibility becomes both the means of asserting presence and the condition under which cultural identity is stripped of nuance and repackaged as spectacle. Even when creators seek to educate or demystify, the architecture of the platform bends toward controversy, voyeurism, and dehumanization, leaving them caught between the desire to share and the exhaustion of being consumed.
Discussion
In this paper we examined how entrepreneurial and identity labor intersect in the case of #JewTok, analyzing how Jewish creators’ everyday practices are shaped by TikTok’s affordances, vernaculars, and governance systems. Our goal was to understand how Jewish creators mobilize the platform to negotiate belonging, teach, and advocate while also confronting both human and algorithmic harassment, erasure, and harm. In doing so, we situate our analysis within scholarly conversations on entrepreneurial labor (Neff, 2012), identity work (; ), and platform studies (; van Dijck et al., 2019), demonstrating how ethnoreligious expression online is entangled with the politics of visibility and the broader logics of platform economies of attention.
Our analysis of #JewTok is situated within the longer history of religion’s adaptation to digital media, where institutions and religious actors have long used online spaces—from websites and blogs to YouTube sermons and interactive forums—to extend authority, authenticity, community, and practice beyond physical settings (; Tsuria and Campbell, 2021). What #JewTok demonstrates is how these dynamics are now reconfigured under platform conditions. Authority is no longer primarily anchored in institutions but negotiated via platform logics. Jewish creators exemplify the shift from digital religion to platformed religion, where identity work is entrepreneurial, aestheticized, and precarious, shaped as much by algorithmic systems as by theological frameworks.
We have found that the shift toward platformed ethno-religious communication makes visibility for marginalized identities increasingly volatile. As Bucher (2012) demonstrates, algorithmic visibility is not only unstable and contingent but also relational, depending on shifting signals of engagement, circulation, and ranking that lie outside the control of individual creators. This volatility confirms argument that visibility is always bound with power, since recognition online brings both opportunity and exposure to harm. Jewish creators experience this tension directly, as their content is inseparable from their ethnoreligious identity. Suppression, stereotyping, and voyeurism therefore register as attacks on both individuality and labor.
We argue that the volatility of platformed visibility on TikTok is not incidental but is sustained through the entrepreneurial labor of transforming identity into a marketable asset. Neff’s (2012) account of entrepreneurial labor shows how creators normalize precarity as part of their work, while highlight how identity itself becomes the product of these ventures. Our findings connect these perspectives by showing that, on #JewTok, creators’ efforts to invite feedback, resist stereotypes, and strategically use affordances to remain visible continually refashion religious and cultural identities. In this way, volatility and entrepreneurial identity labor are mutually reinforcing, shaped by platform vernaculars and governance constraints.
Yet visibility is unevenly distributed. Our analysis reveals that the majority of visible creators are white, indicating that whiteness amplifies certain Jewish voices—a pattern that aligns with findings on TikTok’s privileging of white bodies. Within Jewish ethnoreligiosity, this dynamic is mirrored in the preference for Ashkenazi over Sephardic and Mizrahi voices, which reproduces longstanding racialized hierarchies. Importantly, this skew also reflects the composition of our recruitment pool rather than the full range of Jewish expression on TikTok. Nonetheless, as argues, platforms are designed around the assumption of a “default user”–white, male, heterosexual, able-bodied, and Christian–rendering other identities deviant. For #JewTok, this compounds the entrepreneurial labor of visibility, as those outside this “norm” must continually engage in additive work to resist being positioned as “other” online. In this way, structural platform bias intersects with ethnoreligious hierarchies to shape who can readily secure visibility and recognition.
These unequal distributions of visibility do not occur in isolation but are reinforced by platform governance. Our findings show that TikTok’s moderation systems not only reproduce algorithmic antisemitism but also create what we call a religious panopticon, where Jewish life is hyper-exposed and surveilled. Despite claims of fairness, moderation frequently fails to catch coded antisemitism while penalizing those who resist it, meaning that educational or corrective videos are often removed while the original hate remains online. At the same time, creators who share religious rituals or cultural practices find their content stripped of context and reframed as spectacle, feeding into voyeuristic curiosity or mockery. Together, these dynamics deepen the entrepreneurial and emotional labor required of Jewish creators: they must disguise posts, draft multiple versions, and continually negotiate how their identity is perceived while bracing for harassment, erasure, or misrecognition. What emerges from our corpus is that Jewish creators are not only fighting antisemitism but also the infrastructural conditions that make their very identity work precarious and extractive.
Our findings also point to concrete directions for platform governance. Platforms should treat context as a core requirement in enforcement, as TikTok’s recurring failure to distinguish between antisemitic speech and content that educates about antisemitism underscores the need for stronger “counter-speech” protections. Moderation must also be paired with transparency that is meaningful to creators: when content is removed or downranked, creators should receive specific policy rationales, the exact flagged element (audio, caption, or visual), and access to a rapid appeal process reviewed by staff with cultural competence. Without such explainability, enforcement remains opaque and is experienced as arbitrary, reinforcing the sense of platform gaslighting (). At the level of design, platforms can mitigate algorithmic antisemitism by weakening reward structures that make harassment profitable, adding friction to pile-ons and coordinated attacks, expanding creator controls over exposure, and strengthening safeguards for live streams where abuse escalates quickly. Ongoing partnerships with civil society and community experts are crucial for stress-testing policies against evolving antisemitic vernaculars, especially in memetic formats where hate thrives through ambiguity. These interventions would not eliminate hostility, but they would reduce the structural asymmetry that allows hate to circulate easily while corrective and identity-affirming speech remains fragile.
While this study contributes to scholarship on the precarity of creator economies and the particular online vulnerabilities of ethno-religious creators, it is not without limitations. Our analysis is based on a particular corpus of #JewTok videos and interviews, intended to illuminate underlying mechanisms rather than produce universal claims, which constrains the findings generalizability and reflects the specific conditions of TikTok at the time of data collection. We also focused on TikTok rather than examining how Jewish identity labor unfolds across multiple platforms with distinct affordances and governance systems, which limits our ability to assess how these dynamics vary across the wider platform ecosystem. Future research could productively and longitudinally combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to compare ethnoreligious content creation across different platforms, investigate algorithmic bias affecting other marginalized groups, and trace how creators migrate between platforms in response to harassment and erasure.
Statements
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are included in the article/supplementary material, further inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Ethics statement
The studies involving humans were approved by the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The studies were conducted in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.
Author contributions
TD: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. GB: Conceptualization, Supervision, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. JR: Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing. JM: Conceptualization, Investigation, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.
Funding
The author(s) declared that financial support was not received for this work and/or its publication.
Conflict of interest
The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Generative AI statement
The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.
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Correction note
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Summary
Keywords
affordances, antisemitism, entrepreneurial labor, ethnoreligious, jewish, platforms, TikTok
Citation
Divon T, Beacken GD, Rauchberg J and Maddox J (2026) Jewish entrepreneurial labor on TikTok: navigating visibility, identity, and algorithmic harm. Front. Comput. Sci. 8:1712509. doi: 10.3389/fcomp.2026.1712509
Received
24 September 2025
Revised
02 February 2026
Accepted
20 April 2026
Published
22 July 2026
Corrected
05 August 2026
Volume
8 - 2026
Edited by
Lara Kobilke, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Reviewed by
Cristóbal Fernández Muñoz, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Daniela Jaramillo-Dent, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Updates
Copyright
© 2026 Divon, Beacken, Rauchberg and Maddox.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Tom Divon, zem1987@gmail.com
Disclaimer
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